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Review: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste
Ng

[GoodReads
Rating: 5/5]

A while ago I
read Celeste Ng’s bestselling novel Everything
I Never Told You and had meant to review it, but, perhaps ironically, a
death in my family derailed me for the better part of the past two months.Now that life permits, I’m going to share my
thoughts on this super-hyped novel.

Everything I Never Told You is about the Lees, a Chinese-American family
living in a small Ohio college town in the 1970s.One morning, the family notices that their
middle child, Lydia, is missing; soon, however, Lydia’s body is found floating
in the lake near the family’s home.The mystery
of how and why Lydia ended up in the lake consumes both the town and the Lee
family.However, even after the sensationalism
surrounding the young woman’s fate fades from the headlines, the mystery of her
death and the aspects of Lydia’s life she never shared with her parents and
siblings begins to tear the family apart.Long-held resentments make themselves plain and, for the reader, the
degree to which Lydia was a cypher for her family’s aspirations and
frustrations becomes startlingly clear.

The aspect of
the novel that I appreciated most was Ng’s exploration of what it is like to
live in a biracial family, particularly in a non-urban environment.Ng’s exploration of the micro-aggressions
that the Lee family face at home and school helped me to better understand the
character’s motivations and interactions with one another.As a European-American woman who has spent
her whole life in a suburban area, this novel made me stop and think twice
about the ways in which my own preconceptions of race and racial performance
have influence my interactions with others.

Moreover, the
novel made me reassess the ways in which our parents’ frustrations and
aspirations are projected on to us and the degree to which we, as children, are
responsible for mediating these projections.

While the novel
provides no easy answers for either the Lee family nor the reader themselves,
Everything I Never Told You does what all great works of literature should do:
force you to take stock of your position in the world.